Margaret Urban Walker


Margaret Urban Walker, is the Donald J. Schuenke Chair Emerita in Philosophy at Marquette University. Before her appointment at Marquette, she was the Lincoln Professor of Ethics at Arizona State University, and before that she was at Fordham University. She has also previously held visiting appointments at Washington University at St. Louis, the University of South Florida, and the Catholic University of Leuven.
In 2002, Walker was awarded the Cardinal Mercier chair at the Catholic University of Leuven, and was the first woman ever to hold the chair.

Education and career

Walker received her bachelor's in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1969. She went on to receive her master's in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1971, and her doctorate in philosophy, also from Northwestern, in 1975.
Walker was a member of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University for 28 years before moving to Arizona State University from 2002 to 2010, and moving to Marquette University in 2010. She retired in May 2017. She held visiting appointments at Washington University at St. Louis, the University of South Florida, and the Catholic University of Leuven. During her second visiting appointment at the Catholic University of Leuven, she was the first woman to hold the Cardinal Mercier Chair in Philosophy. She also was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values from 2003 to 2004.

Research areas

Walker's recent research has focused on repairing moral relations after wrongdoing, especially in relation to political violence. She has contributed to research projects with the International Center for Transitional Justice on gender and reparations and truth commissions. She was drawn to this area through her earlier work, in which she focused on the effects of social inequalities on the way morality is understood in ethics and everyday life. Some of her earlier research focused on developing a social differences-focused approach to ethical theory. She strongly defends the view that although moral understandings are inextricably linked to the historical and social practices that they derived from, that those historical and social practices not only can be, but must be critically assessed.

Publications

Books

Walker has authored five books, numerous book chapters, and a large number of papers.
From 2005-2010, Walker served as an associate editor of. She served as series co-editor of Feminist Constructions, a 25-volume series of books released between 2002 and 2007. She co-edited the annual volume of the Association of Feminist Ethics and Social Theory from 2003 to 2005.
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